Michelle Conder - The Most Expensive Lie of All

What had really fascinated him in the early days was how people had been so ready to write him off because of his Latino blood and his lack of a formal education. What they hadn’t realised was that the game of polo had perfectly set him up to achieve in the business world. Killer instincts combined with a tireless work ethic and the ability to think on his feet were all attributes to make you succeed in polo and in business, and Cruz had them in spades. What he didn’t have right now—what he wanted—was a text from his lawyer advising him that he was the proud owner of one of East Hampton’s most prestigious horse studs: Ocean Haven Farm.

Resisting another urge to check his phone, he prowled around the squash court, using the bottom of his sweat-soaked T-shirt to swipe at the perspiration dripping down his face.

‘Nice abs,’ a feline voice quipped appreciatively through the glass window overlooking the court.

Ah, there she was now.

Lauren Burnside, one of the Boston lawyers he sometimes used for deals he didn’t want made public knowledge before the fact, her hip cocked, her expression a smooth combination of professional savvy and sexual knowhow.

‘I always thought you were packing a punch beneath all those business suits, Señor Rodriguez. Now I know you are.’

‘Lauren.’ Cruz let his T-shirt drop and waited for her hot eyes to trail back up to his. She was curvy, elegant and sophisticated, and he had nearly slept with her about a year ago but had baulked at the last minute. He still couldn’t figure out why. ‘Long way to come to make a house call, counsellor. A text would have sufficed.’

‘Not quite. We have a hitch.’ She smiled nonchalantly. ‘And since I was in California, just a hop, skip and a jump away from Acapulco, I thought I’d deliver the news mano-a-mano.’ She smiled. ‘So to speak.’

Cruz scowled, for once completely unmoved by the flick of her tongue across her glossy mouth.

He knew women found him attractive. He was tall, fit, with straight teeth and nose, a full head of black hair, and he was moneyed-up and uninterested in love. It appeared to be the perfect combination. ‘Untameable,’ as one date had purred. He’d smiled, told her he planned to stay that way and she’d come on even stronger. Women, in his experience, were rarely satisfied and usually out for what they could get. If they had money they wanted love. If they had love they wanted money. If they had twenty pairs of shoes they wanted twenty-one. It was tedious in the extreme.

So he ignored his lawyer’s honey trap and kept his mind sharp. ‘That’s not what I want to hear on a deal that was meant to be completed two hours ago, Ms Burnside.’ He kept his voice carefully blank, even though his heart rate had sped up faster than during the whole squash game.

‘Let me come down.’

For all the provocation behind those words Cruz could tell she had picked up his not interested vibe and was smart enough to let it drop.

‘She your latest?’

‘No.’

Cruz’s curt response raised his brother’s eyebrows.

‘She wants to be.’

Cruz folded his arms as Lauren pushed open the clear door and stepped onto the court, her power suit doing little to disguise the killer body beneath. She inhaled deeply, the smell of male sweat clearly pleasing to her senses.

‘You boys have been playing hard,’ she murmured provocatively, looking at them from beneath dark lashes.

Okay, so maybe she wasn’t that smart. ‘What’s the hitch?’ Cruz prompted.

She raised a well-tended brow at his curtness. ‘You don’t want to go somewhere more private?’

‘This is Ricardo, my brother, and vice-president of Rodriguez Polo Club. I repeat: what’s the hitch?’

Lauren’s forehead remained wrinkle-free in the face of his growing agitation and he didn’t know if that was due to nerves of steel or Botox. Maybe both.

‘The hitch,’ she said calmly, ‘is the granddaughter. Aspen Carmichael.’

Cruz felt his shoulders bunch at the unexpectedness of hearing the name of the female he was doing his best to forget. The last time he’d laid eyes on her she’d been seventeen, dressed in nothing but a nightie and putting on an act worthy of Marilyn Monroe.

The little scheme she and her preppy fiancé had concocted had done Cruz out of a fortune in money and, more importantly, lost him the respect of his family and peers.

Aspen Carmichael had bested him once before and he’d walked away. He’d be damned if he walked away again.

‘How?’

‘She wants to keep Ocean Haven for herself and her uncle has magnanimously agreed to sell it to her at a reduced cost. The information has only just come to light, but apparently if she can raise the money in the next five days the property is hers.’

Cruz stilled. ‘How much of a reduced cost?’

When Lauren named a figure half that which he had offered he cursed loudly. ‘Joe Carmichael is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but why the hell would he do that?’

‘Family, darling.’ Lauren shrugged. ‘Don’t you know that blood is thicker than water?’

Yes, he did, but what he also knew was that everyone was ultimately out for themselves and if you let your guard down you’d be left with nothing more than egg on your face.

He ran a hand through his damp hair and sweat drops sprayed around his head.

Lauren jumped back as if he’d nearly drenched her designer suit in sulphuric acid and threw an embarrassed glance towards Ricardo, who was busy surveying her charms.

Cruz snapped his attention away from both of them and concentrated on the blank wall covered in streaks of rubber from years of use.

Eight years ago Ocean Haven had been his home. For eleven years he had lived above the main stable and worked diligently with the horses—first as a groom, then as head trainer and finally as manager and captain of Charles Carmichael’s star polo team. He’d been lifted from poverty and obscurity in a two-dog town because of his horsemanship by the wealthy American who had spotted him on the hacienda where Cruz had been working at the time.

Cruz gritted his teeth.

He’d been thirteen and trying to keep his family from going under after the sudden and pointless death of his father.

Charles Carmichael, he’d later learned, had ambitious plans to one day build a polo ‘dream team’ to rival all others, and he’d seen in Cruz his future protégé. His mother had seen in him an unmanageable boy she could use to keep the rest of his siblings together. She’d said sending him off with the American would be the best for him. What she’d meant was that it would be the best for all of them, because Old Man Carmichael was paying her a small fortune to take him. Cruz had known it at the time—and hated it—but because he’d loved his family more than anything he’d acquiesced.

And, hell, in the end his mother had been right. By the age of seventeen Cruz had become the youngest player ever to achieve a ten handicap—the highest ranking any player could achieve and one that only a handful ever did. By the age of twenty he’d been touted as possibly the best polo player who had ever lived.

By twenty-three the dream was over and he’d become the joke of the very society who had kissed his backside more times than he cared to remember.

All thanks to the devious Aspen Carmichael. The devious and extraordinarily beautiful Aspen Carmichael. And what shocked Cruz the most was that he hadn’t expected it of her. She’d blindsided him and that had made him feel even more foolish.

She had come to Ocean Haven as a lonely, sweet-natured ten-year-old who had just lost her mother in a horrible accident some had whispered was suicide. He’d hardly seen her during those years. His summers had been spent playing polo in England and she had attended some posh boarding school the rest of the year. To him she’d always been a gawky kid with wild blonde hair that looked as if it could use a good pair of scissors. Then one year he’d injured his shoulder and had to spend the summer—her summer break—at Ocean Haven, and bam! She had been about sixteen and she had turned into an absolute stunner.